Wednesday, 6 February 2013

The first hurdle for the same-sex marriage bill has been passed. I'm not entirely sure, but I think 400 votes in favour is the largest show of support there's been for any LGBT equality measure to date. Yes, 175 against...

I tried to juggle lots of things at once during the debate in the Commons including live-tweeting what was being said on @BiCommunityNews - some contributions good and bad will have been missed while I was on the phone to people, talking to people face-to-face, or moving from here to there, but I'll paste a little timeline below.

Watching the debate you'd've thought there was going to be a much tighter result. One after another MPs stood up to grump about the bill: the trouble for most of them being, they'd decided what they thought of it when they got to the idea "it's about the gays", but now had to concoct some bold excuse as to why they were going to vote no that sounded a bit more high principled than "gays have got cooties and if they can marry we might catch it off a registrar".

As ever, indeed from the moment I got the tip-off that this bill was going to be announced, I am a little bit like a rabbit in headlights: I grew up on 80s tabloid hatred and the coming together of Tories and Labour to foist Section 28 on us all. Somehow just two decades later I wound up living on a different planet from all that stuff, even if it is a world with a lot of confused aliens from 80s-world.

Here in Greater Manchester we're one of the six English subregions electing new supermayors, alongside places like Liverpool City Region...

Jen

I'm a bi activist in the UK - editor at Bi Community News, and behind projects like Bi Bloggers (which brings together people writing about bi life in the UK) and BiPhoria, the UK's longest-running bi group.

I led the teams running the UK BiCon in 2004 and the International BiCon in 2000, and more recently initiated The Bisexuality Report (pub. Open University 2012) and the Bisexuality Research Guidelines (pub. BCN & BiUK 2012).

The Bisexuality Report was the natural progression from the Bi Life report in 2003. You can grab that one off the BiPhoria website.